Editorial Note: Challenging Expectations: Gender, Class, and Race in Domestic and Transatlantic Contexts

This issue highlights multiple methodologies that capture how women renegotiated assumptions about proper gender, class, and race relationships in North America and the transatlantic world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We open with two approaches to the domestic as a context for gender challenge in the 1920s and 1930s. Stephanie Smith, in "The Painter and the Communist," follows the career of the peripatetic US artist Ione Robinson and her short stay in Mexico City in the late 1920s. In Mexico's postrevolutionary era, the city was a lively transnational hub for artists, writers, philosophers, and art historians. Drawn to its artistic scene, Robinson arrived in Mexico City in the late 1920s, where she met and quickly married the communist journalist Joseph Freedman. Smith uses biography to explore "one woman's rebellion" against domestic conventions: she was indeed a nontraditional woman "seeking to mold herself to an unusual but still traditional marriage." But she chafed under the constraints of prevailing gender norms and assumptions. She "hated the duties of housewife" and wanted time to paint. Drawing on family letters and archival materials from Mexico City, Amsterdam, and the Hoover Institution in the United States, Smith explores in rich evocative detail the dissolution of the marriage and Robinson's final decision to return to the United States in the spring of 1931. These personal details are artfully set against the backdrop of the challenging political climate in Mexico City at the end of the decade.

If Smith peers into the "intricate intimacies" of a short marriage, Ellen Cain looks from a distance at the collective activism of well-off housewives who used their domestic identities as wives and consumers to support women's labor struggles. In "'We Used to be Patrons—Now we are Pickets!'" Cain follows the "careful radicalism" of a group of middle-and upper-class members of the League of Women Shoppers during the Depression and the immediate postwar era in US history. The organization grew out of the effort to educate an informed citizenry after women obtained the vote in 1919, gradually broadening its purview to address the impact of legislation on labor reforms and civil rights. Its members had a view of social interconnection that transcended class and privilege: demeaning housework, they said, denigrated both the housewife and the domestic servant. At times working in tandem with other labor and trade union groups, they also adopted a distinct mission to "educate the keeper of the family purse in ways of spending money with the best results." These optimal outcomes required paying attention to the workers who made the goods and to the collective needs of the community at large. Cain shows that at two key moments of working-class women's labor unrest—during the National Pants Workers strikes in 1937 and a mobilization of striking waitresses in Alexandria, Virginia in 1939—League women put their politics to the test and joined the picket lines, demanding a "living wage for all." They did so, however, with "lady-like restraint" and dressed "fashionably yet sensibly." This public display reflected their consistent effort to bring together a moderate radicalism with tradition and it found vocal critics on the left and the right. At first, the League was challenged by labor activists committed to "class struggle." In the postwar era, the organization could not withstand the public scrutiny of a growing chorus of anticommunist forces mobilizing societal support by appealing to "home, country, and religion" and the group was forced to dissolve. Cain's study of its flourishing adds to existing scholarship on how domestic roles and, indeed, family life can be sources of progressive politics.

The next two articles also address women's oppositional politics but utilize an analytical method situated between individual biography and the study of collective activism. Each author employs cohort analysis to reveal wider patterns through comparative life stories. Stephanie Richmond, in "Race, Class, and Antislavery," examines black women's antislavery struggles through the life and career of three prominent leaders who worked alongside white women to end the slave system in...